Hundreds of protesters danced and celebrated their “victory” on Saturday 11 December, when lifting roadblocks and dismantling their fortune shelters on large highways.
Le Monde with AFP
After a year of mobilization and a fight finally victorious, they return to their fields. Thousands of Indian farmers packaged their business and demonstrated tent villages on Saturday 11 December, on the outskirts of New Delhi, in order to return home after a year of events against the agrarian policy of the government. Hundreds of them danced and celebrated their “victory” on Saturday morning, when lifting roadblocks and dismantling their fortune shelters on large highways.
The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, had voted by Parliament last month the repeal of the three agrarian reforms which, according to the protesters, would allow private companies to control the agricultural sector of the country. However, the protesters first refused to leave their camps, putting forward further claims, such as a fixed minimum price guarantee on their agricultural products.
The Government has promised the Constitution of a Commission on the subject and is committed to the judgment of the prosecutions against farmers who burn crop stubble, accused of polluting the air of New Delhi every winter.
Biggest crisis for the Government of Narendra Modi
The authorities also accepted the payment of compensation to families hundreds of farmers who, according to them, died during the events as well as the cessation of criminal proceedings against the protesters.
This movement of farmers, the biggest crisis for the Government of Mr. Modi since his arrival in power, emphasizes both the structural crisis crossed by peasant agriculture and the lack of empathy and dialogue on the part of the Prime Minister, who had promised, during his election in 2014, to double their income by 2022.
Farmers account for nearly half of the population – 650 million Indians, but only 14% of gross domestic product (GDP). They hold more and smaller plots and are increasingly indebted under the pressure of an intensive mode of production from the 1960s’ green revolution.
The agricultural laws wanted by Mr. Modi had been voted in September 2020 to authorize farmers to sell their production to buyers of their choice, rather than turning exclusively towards state-controlled markets providing them with a price of Minimum support (PSM) for some commodities. Number of smallholder farmers were opposed to it, threatened by this liberalization, which, they said, could force them to sell their goods to large companies.
After manifestations in Punjab and Haryana, in the north of the country, tens of thousands of farmers had directed to the capital, where they had been violently pushed back by the police, marking the beginning of a Impasse between the two parts that lasted one year.
Since its re-election, in May 2019, M. Modi plays a strategy of tension, exacerbates antagonisms to discredit opponents of its reforms. In December 2019, an Act attributing Indian nationality to refugees, unless they are Muslim, had aroused a protest movement of unpublished magnitude throughout the country. For months, Indians had come down in the street and the protest had only ended in the arrival of the Cvid-19 epidemic and the general confinement ordered by the Prime Minister.